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1. Introduction
Business model innovation (BMI) has received a great deal of attention lately across a broad spectrum of literature ranging from entrepreneurship to strategic management (Foss and Saebi, 2017). Since the initial contribution of Bellman et al. (1957), researchers have been struggling to find a suitable definition of BMI (Clauss, 2017), and to determine the different dimensions that define the logic of BMI (Spieth and Schneider, 2016) in order to obtain an appropriate measure (Massa et al., 2017). Nowadays, most companies that perform successfully in the market indicate BMI as the key element in achieving its goals. Sorescu et al. (2011, p. 4) define a business model in the following manner: “[…]a well-specified system of interdependent structures, activities, and processes that serves as a firm’s organizing logic for value creation (for its customers) and value appropriation (for itself and its partners).”
However, apart from conceptual considerations, few studies analyze in depth the drivers that explain the evolution of a business model (Lambert and Davidson, 2013) or relationships with other variables inside the organization (Cortimiglia et al., 2016). In line with this argument, Foss and Saebi (2017) question whether the business model is the outcome of a specific design exercise and consider the real impact of an innovation improvement in the business model. Thus, antecedent and outcomes of BMI require further research and explanation.
First of all, it is essential to understand how a company transforms or adapts its resources to innovation through a business model. A business model, considered as the underlying logic of the firm (Teece, 2010), describes how a company organizes its different components to achieve its business goals (Massa et al., 2017). The idea behind business models focusses on how to articulate structures, activities and process inside the organization that match the firm´s strategy. In this context, business model experimentation (Baden-Fuller and Morgan, 2010) is crucial to understanding how to deal with new organizational configurations. This evolutionary perspective of BMI (Martins et al., 2015) explains how managers adapt their business models to a new competitive situation.
Business models have several components (Taran et al., 2015) and can be defined as a complex set of elements and linkage mechanisms (Chesbrough, 2010). Surprisingly, organizational complexity has received scarce...